Don Anderson will always remember Sept. 19, 2021, a Sunday, when his life changed forever.
The now 60-year-old podcast host had a chaotic childhood; his parents divorced when he was 5 years old, and they each remarried and had more children. Step- and half-siblings surrounded him. When they were adults, though, they learned his older sister wasn't actually their father's daughter, that her mom was pregnant when they met. Anderson went on 23andMe to help her figure out details about her birth father – only to be confused by his own results.
"I wasn't Norwegian at all, which I should have been," the California resident says. "And I looked at the relatives, and I had two half sisters I'd never heard of." It clicked. He wasn't his dad's child, either. He recalls feeling like "my feet were no longer touching the ground, and not because I was floating, because the ground was no longer there."
Tens of millions of people use kits like AncestryDNA and 23andMe every year to find missing puzzle pieces to their lives. Many receive them as holiday gifts. Out of 23,000 respondents to a survey of DNA service users, 3% discovered a parent was not actually their biological parent, and 5% found full or half-siblings, according to research from the Baylor College of Medicine published in the American Journal of Human Genetics in 2022. While some have happy tales of finding long-lost family members, others aren't as lucky.
